Tuesday, April 17, 2012

JavaScript Compression Tools Comparison

JavaScript compression consists of two processes: minification and obfuscation. Minification is a process of removing comments and unnecessary whitespace from a file. Obfuscation is a process of modifying code, changing the names of variables, functions, members, etc. to reduce the size of code. The following are some popular JavaScript compressors:

It’s very hard to say which one is better. That’s why during my projects, I always try to use all three and compare the output based on different facts. Here I’m going to share the output from one of my projects.

Before going to jump into scenarios, I want to talk about how to use these tools. Here are some command lines that you can use for compression: